Iran has warned it will show “zero restraint” if the country’s energy facilities are targeted again, a day after Israel struck Iran’s critical South Pars gasfield and Tehran hit energy facilities across the Gulf region in retaliation.
“Our response to Israel’s attack on our infrastructure employed FRACTION of our power. The ONLY reason for restraint was respect for requested de-escalation,” Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi had written in a post on X on Thursday.
South Pars is Iran’s biggest source of domestic gas supply, providing 80 percent of the country’s natural gas needs.
The warning comes as Qatar continues to assess damages at its Ras Laffan Industrial City site, which processes approximately 20 percent of the global supplies of liquefied natural gas (LNG), after an Iranian attack.
The strike wiped out about 17 percent of Qatar’s LNG export capacity, causing an estimated $20bn in lost annual revenue and threatening supplies to Europe and Asia, according to QatarEnergy’s CEO.
Saad al-Kaabi told the Reuters news agency that two of Qatar’s 14 LNG trains, the equipment used to liquefy natural gas, and one of its two gas-to-liquids facilities were damaged in Iranian strikes this week.
The repairs will sideline 12.8 million tonnes of LNG production per year for three to five years, he said.
Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated in a news conference that the aim of the war on Iran was to remove the nuclear and ballistic missile threats “before they’re buried deep underground and become immune from aerial attack”.
The prime minister said Israel and the US were “destroying the factories that produce the components to make missiles, wiping out their industrial base in a way we didn’t before”, claiming that Iran’s “command and control structure is in utter chaos”.
Netanyahu also stressed that Israel “acted alone” in striking Iran’s South Pars gasfield and added that it would hold off on any further attacks on energy infrastructure at the request of US President Donald Trump.
Source: Aljazeera